Staff Pick

“She’s a friend to our minds,” Oprah says of the late Toni Morrison in the documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am — a reference to her seminal 1987 novel, Beloved. A filmmaker and friend of Morrison’s for nearly four decades, Timothy Greenfield-Sanders (Lou Reed: Rock and Roll Heart, The Trans List) provides an intimate look at the evolution of the prophetic iconoclast, novelist, and first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The film, which debuted less than two months before Morrison’s death earlier this month at the age of 88, acts as a compelling mosaic of Morrison’s remarkable life (save for the tragic loss of her son Slade, with whom she notably co-authored a series of children’s books), including the construction of her earliest works, 1977’s Song of Solomon and Beloved, as well as her time as an editor at Random House and when she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2012.